Cold Coffee © Rik Lagarto & SpÆ

This’ll be part of the magnificent Beginnings Anthology, a locally produced anthology edited by some lovely people.

This comic was a bit of a change — for one, it’s the first I’ve drawn in a while that was written by someone else! In a lot of ways it pushed me to do new and sometimes terrifying things as well. (For one thing, I’ve never worked on a horror piece before!) Thanks to Rik Lagarto for the script.

On one of the last days, one of our teachers ran a concept challenge for the class: create a character for a game and according to a brief, in what was supposed to be an hour but probably ran a little bit over.

So I tried my hand at applying everything I’d learned over the workshop, and here’s the result.

We had to design a character that was

• inquisitive
• a character who jumped a lot
• not a fighter — able to defend self if necessary, but we weren’t designing something for God of War
• very very very simple
• easy to read — expressive
• for what sounded like a puzzle-filled platforming game

I took the simple, inquisitive and jumping parts of the concept, and focused on those.

If nothing else, I learned the importance of silhouettes. I was moving as quickly as I could, and picked the shape I wanted early — a cross between the three designs at the top of the page. The bottom of the page shows me starting to do some refinements, and working out how the character might move.

Playing a bit more with the character, particularly its head shape — and once I was happy with the head shape, I copied that silhouette and started painting it in. My drawings are a bit all over the place — by the time I got to filling in the silhouette, I started painting near the bottom of the canvas before deciding the faced characters were a little boring. Then the idea of a TV-eyed creature came in…

A couple more tweaks later and this is where we got. Because of the tight time limit, I was tweaking the design even in this stage (e.g., adding the sleeve to the hand to make it seem more like a crown, adding the little bag for the character to collect things in)

At this point it also becomes unfortunately obvious that I haven’t calibrated the screen I was drawing on yet. :B It looked FINE in a dark hall…

All of this work was building up to the final — the coloured version!

And here we have him! This was a very rough quick paint…and a necessary lesson in some software I hadn’t used before! I got some good feedback on him (who I’ll tentatively call Dot for now). There were a few things I was trying to work into his character that I’m not sure read too clearly. I’m planning to fix him up and model him — but that’s another item on a rather long to do list for now

Happy Lunar new year, everyone! Having two new years is more fun — it lets you do over those resolutions you made the first time around I’ve got one resolution so far this year, and that’s to be able to do forward splits…

But I digress.  This year is the year of the water dragon. Good bye, metal rabbit Have this quick paint to celebrate!

The couplet is something my dad recommended, to be a little more interesting than the standard happy new year. Maybe another resolution should be to work on my calligraphy.

I was asked to concept and develop some characters for some state educational conferences this year.

The client gave me the description of the conferences and their focus, and suggested a visual style then gave me free rein to explore. We picked these four designs from a series of concepts I did.

The best part about working on these was seeing how far I’d come since the last time I’d worked with this client.  There’s a certain joy to taking something from a concept, developing it, noticing — and understanding, and fixing — mistakes and preparing a final dynamic piece.

Hello! I’m posting somewhere between the Gregorian and the Lunar New Years.

This is a short chapter that will be in the next issue of The Thing That Should Not Be.

Speedpaint — 20111224 — half an hour

I’ve learned a lot more about art, painting and neat tools this year Here’s a half hour speedpaint, and a much quicker sketch

Happy holidays for 2011!

It’s been a busy couple of weeks, and a busy year all round but I’m looking forward to having some time to myself and my growing games collection (thx Steam).

It’s technically summer where I am, but it doesn’t feel like it! We’ve gotten some amazing and beautiful and crazy-intense storms over the past couple of weeks, and a lot of cold and rain in between. I hope you’re having a safe and happy holiday (or at least un-stressful time) wherever you are

The Monday night life drawing sessions are over for the year! I’ll still try to update this blog at least once a week though

Hour study

I started life drawing way back in May this year, after a friend told me about the sessions. The classes have taken a very hands off approach, but between the somewhat more intense classes earlier into my life drawing career, I’ve learned a lot about both drawing and painting that I’ve been able to apply to a bunch of other media and studies.  Life drawing was definitely the most value-for-money art class I’ve taken this year. I have a long way to go, but I’ve leaped a lot this year in terms of what I can do now to what I could do in January, and I’m pleased to see my progress so far. I hope this continues into the new year!